How to attract target customers to Instagram and remove unnecessary users and bots

How to identify your target audience on Instagram

To understand who your target audience on Instagram is, you need to answer one single main question: what kind of people will consume your product? It doesn't matter what type of product: goods, services or blog content. For example, it's quite obvious that women with a child aged between 18 and 40 will buy goods for children, while both sexes between about 16 and 27 years old will buy teenage clothing.

If you offer your products and services not only on the Internet but also offline, the location of your potential customers is also important. It's unlikely that your store will be visited by people from another city.
Finally, another way to understand who your target audience is is to analyze your competitors' accounts who sell similar products and services or publish content on the same subject.

Analysis of their followers' profiles, as well as captions of competitors who have gained a large number of likes, will help you to understand who exactly may be interested in your page.

Competitive account followers will help to determine the target audience

You can also spy the competitors' hashtags. They use them in own publications and then people are finding their product.

Hashtags play an important role in determining the target audience.

Often, the search for potential customers requires processing a large number of accounts and studying the information that is placed on them. This makes it impossible to carry out such work manually. However, in this case, you can use the help of automated services in order to promote your Instagram account, such as Zengram. It has a parser that allows you to pick up potential followers by competitors, hashtags and geolocation. Then, you can work with the gathered information (for example, like user posts or follow them). Data can be filtered by several criteria (for example, the owner of the page). This is very convenient if you determine the target audience.

This is the main page of Zen-promo service.

However, the automatic promotion has one unpleasant side effect — bots also fall into the list of followers.

The problem of bots and inactive readers

How harmful are bots and inactive users

One of the problems that arise when promoting a commercial account or blog on Instagram is the dominance of bots among followers, who constantly send advertising messages and other spam. At first glance, there is nothing wrong with that, on the contrary, bots increase the total number of followers. But, actually, it's not. Why are bots so harmful? The fact is that they scare off real, live users. Disappointing statistics say that Instagram pages which have many bots are deprived of their followers. This happens for two main reasons.

• Spam. Bots send advertising messages and other stuff. Few users want to receive it all the time.
• Distrust to the page owner. When a person realizes that a significant proportion of followers in a blog or a commercial account are not real people, but bots, the first thing that comes to his mind is that the page gained popularity not due to unique content or a profitable commercial offer, but by buying fans. It's quite natural that most likely they will unfollow such an account.

Another problem is inactive readers who don't commit actions on the social network for a long time. They are also able to scare away people who are ready to follow your page. Potential Instagram customers, seeing that many subscribers are not active, believe that this is due to the poor quality of the products and services or blog content offered on the page. In addition, in a similar situation, there is also a suspicion that such “dead” accounts were simply bought to increase the total number of followers.

However, scaring potential customers is not the worst. The fact is that Instagram algorithms show at the very bottom of the news feed posts of users who have many inactive followers. Because of this, attracting new people to your page will become unproductive.

Where do bots and inactive followers come from

Often, bots massively follow Instagram user accounts by virtue of their algorithm. However, in the case of commercial profiles, they more often appear among followers for other reasons. The fact is that when using automated services that help to promote Instagram page mentioned above, there is a mass-linking, mass-posting of comments, and mass-following. All these actions are performed automatically. At the same time, the page promotion service doesn't understand who it likes or writes a comment to — a living person or bot. Meanwhile, many bots have a program that follows a page of a user who has done the same to them. Therefore, after the work of such a promotion service, many unwanted pages fall into the number of your followers.

As for the "dead", inactive readers, they appear in the course of natural processes: follow your profile, and then for some reason leave the social network.

How to deal with bots and inactive users

The most accessible way to clean your account is to manually filter subscribers. However, in most cases it's unacceptable. As a result of the automatic Instagram profile promotion, quite a large number of them can accumulate, so cleaning your account from them manually will take a lot of time and effort. This method can be used when the number of followers doesn't exceed one or two hundred.

In such situations, you may need the help of automated services to clean your Instagram account. One of them is Spam Guard. This tool allows you to:

• analyze your account and identify unwanted followers;
• clear your profile from them;
• continue to prevent bots, commercial accounts and some other categories of unwanted users to be your followers.

To start using SpamGuard, you will need:

• go to the official website at https://spamguardapp.com;
• pass the registration procedure, during which you must enter your e-mail address and password, and then confirm the intention to register by e-mail;

• add your Instagram account by clicking on the green plus sign.

That's all, now it's possible to begin the work. To do this, run a full or test analysis by clicking on the appropriate button on the main page of the service. The test analysis is completely free, but during it, SpamGuard will process only one-third of your followers and subscriptions.

When the analysis is completed, the service will offer to set the parameters according to which it will clean your account from unwanted followers and subscriptions. You can delete:

• bots;
• commercial profiles;
• accounts that don't show activity;
• non-recipients;
• inactive followers;
• foreigners.

Also, you can exclude any of these positions from being deleted by moving the slider opposite it in the settings menu.

SpamGuard settings menu

If you don't want to remove any accounts, you can add them to the list of exceptions. To do this, the full list of unwanted followers detected during the analysis is displayed to the right of the settings menu. To avoid deleting some account, you just need to find it in this list and switch the green check mark.

Setting exceptions

After your profile is cleared of unwanted followers and subscriptions, you can turn on protection. In this mode, SpamGuard will automatically delete the newly followed unwanted accounts. Protection can be configured by several parameters.

• The language in which the user leaves comments under your posts. You can allow all languages. For example, only Russian or only English. Comments that don't meet the established criteria will be deleted, and their author will be excluded from the followers' list.
• The presence of stop words in users' comment. This option allows you to get rid of spamming bots.
• Block inactive users. When enabled, the service will block followers who haven't performed any actions on Instagram for a long time.
• Block commercial accounts and stores. Enabling this option allows you to remove commercial accounts and stores from followers that are trying to promote their products and services with your account.

Automatic protection set up

Let's sum up

If you want to make your blog or business page on Instagram really popular and, thus, increase the demand for your products or services, it's important to correctly select the target audience. It's often impossible to do this without automated account promotion services since it requires processing large amounts of data. However, automatic promotion leads to the accumulation of bots and inactive users among followers. When there are a lot of such ones, you can’t clear your account manually. However, a solution to this problem exists. There are services that clean your Instagram page automatically. They help to remove bots, foreigners, inactive users and commercial profiles from your followers, as well as to protect your page in the future.